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Show HN: MakeACopy – An offline, open-source document scanner for Android
After building Let’s Bend, a small open-source harmonica training app that surprisingly reached #1 on HN,
I wanted to create something completely different - a document scanner that works fully offline.
MakeACopy is an open-source document scanner app for Android that runs entirely on-device.
No accounts, no ads, no tracking, no cloud - just local processing.
It uses OpenCV + ONNX for document detection and Tesseract for OCR, then exports PDFs with an embedded searchable text layer (or plain text).
Main features:
– Detect and crop documents using OpenCV/ONNX
– Local OCR via Tesseract (no servers)
– Export as searchable PDF or plain text
– 100 % offline, privacy-friendly, open source (Apache 2.0)
Compared to apps like Adobe Scan or Microsoft Lens, MakeACopy doesn’t require an account and avoids any cloud upload.
GitHub: https://github.com/egdels/makeacopy https://github.com/egdels/makeacopy
Website: https://egdels.github.io/makeacopy/ https://egdels.github.io/makeacopy/
Happy to get feedback, questions, or feature suggestions from the community.
- egdels 1y agoFor those interested in the technical side: MakeACopy uses reproducible OpenCV/ONNX builds and runs Tesseract OCR fully on-device. The PDF text layer is generated with Apache PDFBox for full searchability. All binaries are F-Droid–compliant and deterministically reproducible. Happy to discuss the OpenCV/ONNX integration or how the deterministic build setup works.